Random thoughts about random things.

Push Feedly articles to Microsoft Teams

Are you an informationholic? Do you wish you can share interesting stories with your teams to help extend their knowledge as well? Well now there is! After much trial and error, I figured out how to push articles from Feedly (my most favorite digital media aggregation tool) to Microsoft Teams (Microsoft’s answer to Slack with Office 365 subscriptions). For this solution we will use the following services:

Feedly Pro or Feedly Teams, sadly, cannot use Feedly Basic as it does not support the next requirement

IFTTT (If This, Then That), free, but to link to Feedly service, you need Feedly Pro or Feedly Teams.

NOTE: you can use a similar configuration below but have output to Office 365 Groups or general email as well if you prefer or do not use Teams in your office. This article, however, focuses primarily on MS Teams.

The general concept is, when you see an article you are interested in, you can add notes and highlights to the article, then finally save the article to a personal board. These features are actually new to Feedly and you can read more about them here (this is actually what finally got me to buy a subscription to Feedly Pro) – https://blog.feedly.com/boards/

Once the article is saved to a personal board, the IFTTT service will automatically pick it up, then POST a message immediately to the Microsoft Teams channel of your choosing. An important note: In IFTTT we will be using Applets which are much easier to build compared to a full recipe which IFTTT provides support for as well. This means we will be limited to creating one applet per channel. If you want a single article to push to many channels, you will need to create separate applets or create a recipe without using the GUI (i.e. developer method, and beyond my current skill :-P)

Ok, let’s dive in and see what we have.

Step 1: Create personal board in Feedly

We assume you have a Feedly Pro account already, and you are familiar on how to add content to Feedly Pro.

Now create a Personal Board which you want to collect all articles you plan to share with your team if it does not already exist.

Step 2: Create an Incoming Webhook in Microsoft Teams

In Microsoft Teams (either Web or Desktop version), locate (or create) a channel within the team you want to send the Feedly articles to.

Right click on the channel and select Connectors

In the connectors list, locate and click Add for Incomming Webhook

Provide a Name for the webhook, this is what will be shown as the From in the team post from Feedly and upload an image (optional), then click Create

You will notice a new field will appear which contains a URL, this is your webhook URL. Copy it to notepad for use later and select done.

Step 3: Build the IFTTT Applet

This assumes you have an IFTTT account already, but if not, it is easy (and free) to sign up for one, I just already have so I am not able to provide the steps here.

Click on My Applets at the top of the screen then New Applet buttonin the Applets tab

Tap on the blue This word to identify what IFTTT is monitoring and search for Feedly

Select the Trigger that says New article in personal board

Select the personal board you created at the beginning of this article and click Create Trigger

Now tap on the blue That word to identify the outputNOTE: Steps below is to output to Microsoft Teams but you could output to another service such as Email and sent to Office 365 groups or Distribution list as well

Search for the service Maker Webhooks and select it.

In Choose Action screen select the only option on the screen Make a web request

In the Complete action fields is where the real magic occurs

URL this is where you paste your webhook from Microsoft Teams

NOTE: Do not add any “Ingredients” here.

Set Method to POST

Set Content Type to application/json

Body is what will be displayed in Teams. As mentioned, I am not an advanced programmer, but you can read more about what content you can display and how to format it here – https://dev.outlook.com/connectors/reference Use Add Ingredient to integrate content from your article. For example, I wanted to integrate Article Name, Article URL and notes I added in Feedly. The output is as follows:

I recommend you keep Receive Notifications when this applet runs to enabled to help troubleshoot any problems you may have at first

Click Finish

Step 4: Test it out!

If you used the same snippet I used,

jump to Feedly

open an article of interest

save a new note

Save the article to the personal board you selected before

Go back to Microsoft Teams and see the cool output from Feedly!

Troubleshooting

Did you not receive a message in Microsoft Teams? if not, go back to IFTTT.com and then My Applets. Select Activity tab and see if there is any error. Commonly errors occur around the Body text, such as extra space or missing a double quote.